Posted
by
kdawson
on Wednesday October 21, 2009 @02:05AM
from the our-doubts-are-traitors dept.

mi tips us that software intended to help essay graders detect plagiarism has been used to attribute to Shakespeare — with high probability — a hitherto unattributed play, 'The Reign of Edward III.' It seems that the work was co-authored by Shakespeare and another playwright of the time, Thomas Kyd. "With a program called Pl@giarism, Vickers detected 200 strings of three or more words in 'Edward III' that matched phrases in Shakespeare's other works. Usually, works by two different authors will only have about 20 matching strings."

So the software was designed to detect bodies of work that contain phrases from other works. ANd it finds a work that is a composite of Shakespear and Kyd. isn't it more likely that someone back then was plagarizing from Shakespear and Kyd? As opposed to them collaborating?

For example if I turned in a term paper and the plagarism software detected phrases from cory doctrow and thomas pynchon, the conclusion my instructor would leap to is obvioulsy that the three of us collaborated on the term paper right

I think the idea would be that if it picked up their writing "style" they could then locate the piece that you plagiarized from.

In the case mentioned, it doesn't seem like there's an original source that was copied. It's an original work, but has the basic style indicative of Shakespeare. If someone plagiarized him then we'd have to assume that whatever they copied from was lost. It's an easier to accept notion that Shakespeare simply wrote this piece himself.

So actually I think Shakespeare's plays were never copyrighted in the first place.

Sir, I must point out inconsistencies in your argument. It seems that we have two choices:

His works were in fact copyrighted and he lived well from the proceeds.

His works were not copyrighted and he starved to death at an early age.

But records exist that indicate otherwise in both cases. So, my contention is that the records are clearly falsified and we should err on the side of caution. I myself am owner of a corporation that is willing to step up and maintain the legacy of Shakespeare by collecting the royalties for when he returns(1) to claim them. I myself would take no salary for this, only a small(2) annual dividend(3) in order to ensure that the corporation can continue to protect this valuable intellectual property for the forseeable(4) future.

religious freedom cannot deny reincarnation

to maintain myself in the minimum style that the guardian of such a legacy deserves

From TFA there were parts of the text that were very strongly Shakespearian, and parts not. There is no word on whether they did a plagiarism test on this script vs Kyd's work.

Though it's highly plausible to me that they both contributed. If plagiarized by Kyd from Shakespeare then I think there would be clearer similarities between this and other works by Shakespeare: complete conversations or so. Or complete sentences. If this is plagiarized it is at least seriously rewritten.

From TFA there were parts of the text that were very strongly Shakespearian, and parts not. There is no word on whether they did a plagiarism test on this script vs Kyd's work.

Actually, there is, and they did. About 60% of the work does match Kyd's other known works, as well as four other unattributed plays that are believed to be by Kyd as well (and this result would lend further credence to that).

Or complete sentences. If this is plagiarized it is at least seriously rewritten.

Yes. People actually rewrote things while copying back then; no cut-and-paste.

Shakespeare being famous is not necessarily the one being plagiarised. Maybe he is the one plagiarising.

There was no plagiarism in the modern sense back then. Authors, artists, and scientists copied each others works; that's why we got such a rich cultural heritage. Today, you can get in trouble for a single sentence.

Imagine how backwards computers would be if you had to write a new kernel, window system, and libraries every time you wanted to write an application.

Imagine how backwards computers would be if you had to write a new kernel, window system, and libraries every time you wanted to write an application.

Imagine Disney's state today if they hadn't been allowed to make Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Robin Hood, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, or Tarzan, just to name a few.

Game Show Host (John Cleese): Good evening and welcome to Stake Your Claim. First this evening we have Mr Norman Voles of Gravesend who claims he wrote all Shakespeare's works. Mr Voles, I understand you claim that you wrote all those plays normally attributed to Shakespeare?

Voles (Michael Palin): That is correct. I wrote all his plays and my wife and I wrote his sonnets.

Host: Mr Voles, these plays are known to have been performed in the early 17th century. How old are you, Mr Voles?

Voles: 43.

Host: Well, how is it possible for you to have written plays performed over 300 years before you were born?

Voles: Ah well. This is where my claim falls to the ground.

Host: Ah!

Voles: There's no possible way of answering that argument, I'm afraid. I was only hoping you would not make that particular point, but I can see you're more than a match for me!

Host: Mr Voles, thank you very much for coming along.

Voles: My pleasure.

Host: Next we have Mr Bill Wymiss who claims to have built the Taj Mahal.

So they've found a play that has some of Shakespeare's pet phrases in it. How do we know Shakespeare wrote it? We need to be able to reject alternatives like someone plagiarising those phrases from Shakespeare, or someone writing a deliberate homage of Shakespeare.
Something similar happens in linguistics, where you're trying to tell if two languages are related but you can't tell if a pair of words are cognates or borrowed.

Well, seeing as Shakespeare insists on remaining dead (and has indeed done so for almost four hundred years), I would venture to suggest that it's unlikely you're ever going to get a 100% guaranteed dead-cert answer to the question from a primary source.

Well, seeing as Shakespeare insists on remaining dead (and has indeed done so for almost four hundred years), I would venture to suggest that it's unlikely you're ever going to get a 100% guaranteed dead-cert answer to the question from a primary source.

But what about others who were alive at that time? Surely they can't all be dead!
Or has there been some mass murder of people who lived 400 years ago?

About six years ago, the Royal Shakespeare Company presented a performance of Edward III and attributed it to Shakespeare.
It's accepted that Shakespeare didn't write every word of every plays in his canon (for example, he didn't write most of Pericles and Henry VIII) but there was obviously enough evidence for most Shakespeare scholars to accept that he wrote a substantial part of it. This latest piece of research is just a further piece of evidence, but it's nothing radically new.

As to the latter, he might not have wanted to claim too much ownership to that play, given its first performance only 10 years after the death of Elizabeth, Henry's daughter. Dangerous ground indeed, given the treatment meted out by the Queen's secret police to other playwrights of the time.

In fact, the first performance of that play happened to be the same night the Globe Theatre burnt down. Good fodder for conspiracy theories there...

Back in college I briefly took a creative writing course which was filled with snobs clutching their leatherbound Infinite Jest copies who used words like "perspectival" and "serendipitous."

During one of the meetings the lecture focused on poetic expression with an emphasis on sonnets. Homework consisted of writing an abab, cdcd, efef, gg sonnet and reading it outloud to the circle of douchebags who then offered their opinions about the piece. Being an industrious person, I applied my murky understanding of F/OSS principles to the fine craft of poetic expression and forked one of Shakespeare's obscure sonnets, changing some archaic words into more modern form.

Yup, using speech as a social status marker is what aristocrats use to make sure that everyone around knows what they are. Yearning for aristocratic status causes people to behave as douchebags of the highest order, the poor souls.

Yes of course! I'd much rather express myself in a verbose manner.
Using entire sentences where one word would suffice. Lest someone mistake me for a douchebag.

Indeed! I would much rather suffer the slings and arrows of condescension from those above. Than have to hang my head in shame in front of my selfrighteous, but lowly, peers for the sin of speaking well.

The article mentions the fact that there was very high competitive pressure on writers to compose plays very quickly so I wonder if there actually was plagiarism going on here. How hard would it have been for one of these writers to get at least a fairly crude copy of Shakespeare's work and utilise various elements of Shakespeare's previous plays? Can anyone enlighten us as to the probability of this being the case or for that matter how common plagiarism actually was at the time?

Getting access to the play was easy: admission was a penny. They most certainly did go to each other's works and steal phrases from each other. Shakespeare clearly cribbed from Marlowe, among others.

They stole stories from each other all the time. Stories were considered common property. Trying to protect them would seem as absurd as many Slashdotters consider software patents.

But they were fairly protective of the play as a whole. There was just one master copy, and each actor would get a copy literally of his lines, plus the cue that came before each. Saved copying expenses (it's not like they had a xerox) and also protected the plays. And those cue sheets were treated as secrets.

Eventually the play would be published (and performed without royalties), but Edward III was published fairly early in Shakespeare's career, and it would be hard to gather up enough material from the previously printed plays to make up a new one attributable to Shakespeare.

Attribution is more art than science, and attempts to do it with software are pretty controversial. Just because this software agrees with the experts this time doesn't fill me with confidence about the software.

I've looked at it myself, and it definitely fits in with Shakespeare's other early history plays. But it's not his best work. It has a few genuinely good scenes, and it deserves to be studied with the rest of the canon, but it's not exactly Hamlet or Richard III. I doubt most people will ever see it.

> it's not exactly Hamlet or Richard III.> I doubt most people will ever see it.MacBeth isn't exactly Hamlet, but that hasn't stopped *it* from being studied. Heck, it gets studied *almost* as much as Hamlet.

Romeo and Juliet is a *far* cry from Hamlet (frankly, by comparison it's drivel), but if anything it's more famous, having been redone and remade *many* more times, and in fact R&J may even be the most famous work of literature[1] ever written in the English language.

I was speaking ironically. Edward III isn't even Henry IV part 1. But it's about on par with Richard II, though it hasn't got anything to compare to the John of Gaunt "Royal throne of kings" speech.

R&J is better than it's usually given credit for. Shallow adaptations have made it seem like a shallow play, and high school English teachers usually completely miss the pint in an attempt to make it "relevant". It's really quite well-written and far more interesting than that. The Luhrman version isn't

This software is for detecting plagiarism. In the situation it is designed for, one person uses another person's work but tries not to reveal the fact. The program catches this by noting that the pieces of writing are too similar. If it's well-designed, then it is good at this task, so it should be reasonably sensitive to similarity.

The "authentication" scenario described in TFA is very different. Assume the play is fake (written by someone pretending to be Shakespeare). Then it is not a case of one person

Another use would be to apply the algorithms to religious books to reveal which parts were really inspired by a divinity, and which parts were simply invented by some random, power hungry, con man, to control his peers.

I can't help but think that while people who are genuinely interested in the history of the Bible might find it fascinating, there's a certain amount of "be careful what you ask for, you just might get it". Particularly among any that are interested in the history of the Bible because of their own religious beliefs rather than just an academic interest in a very old book.

I can't help but think that while people who are genuinely interested in the history of the Bible might find it fascinating, there's a certain amount of "be careful what you ask for, you just might get it". Particularly among any that are interested in the history of the Bible because of their own religious beliefs rather than just an academic interest in a very old book.

You don't think it possible that they might want to know whether their beliefs are well founded?

Most people with such beliefs don't need confirmation from some "outside source" as to whether their beliefs are well founded. That's why they call if faith.

I think you will find that if someone did "confirm" that many biblical works were plagiarized or whatever, that believers would not care. In their minds, the Bible (or whatever particular work they believe in) is the "word of God" and it doesn't matter who put it to paper. They will accept that one person could have been inspired to write several dif

Isn't it pretty well established that many of the works in the bible were not recorded until years after the fact, sometimes hundreds of years? And take his "study the bible" with a huge grain of salt. That means read it, apply our values to what it says, and further our agenda. If they really wanted to learn, they would actively allow and encourage the "questioning" of their faith/beliefs. They would also at least learn about another religion; however that would probably highlight all the stupid stuff

If they really wanted to learn, they would actively allow and encourage the "questioning" of their faith/beliefs. They would also at least learn about another religion

Why do you assume that people at seminary don't do that? In my experience (second-hand, from people who have been) that's exactly what goes on at seminary. It also goes on a great deal in the churches I have dealings with, although necessarily at a less academic level. A local Christian church recently organised a trip to a Hindu Temple for an explanation of Hinduism and invited a Muslim speaker along to explain Islam (I went along to both). Last time I attended a Christian service (not at the same church)

Anybody that applied serious scientific thinking to it wouldn't take it any more seriously than they do Greek mythology.

Firstly, although I realise this is an unpopular view on/., "scientific" thinking isn't necessarily the only type of thinking that is relevant (hint: what sort of thinking would you need to use to determine that "scientific" thinking is the only relevant sort of thinking?) Secondly, although I doubt a strictly literalist fundamentalist reading of the Bible would stand up to "scientific" thinking (if we grant that it would have to), there are more nuanced ways of "believing" in the Bible

Some religious sects do encourage questioning of the bible. Some don't believe the (King James version of the, lol) bible is the actual word of god, but instead a document written by humans. While it is still the basis of the faith, it is understood that it is written for people in the 1st century BC and therefore should be interpreted through that lens. You shouldn't stereotype over such a diverse range of people like that. It just makes you sound ignorant and reactionary.

Most people with such beliefs don't need confirmation from some "outside source" as to whether their beliefs are well founded. That's why they call if faith.

That's a common myth, often repeated by the more militant atheists. Although there have been some crackpots who reject evidence and reason, who provide ample fuel for the myth to get around, I think you will find that most people of faith have just as much regard for reason and evidence as atheists do and agnostics like I do (at least within the Christian traditions, which have a strong history of reliance on evidence). They simply make different assumptions when the evidence runs out. (And everybody makes

I never said they disregarded reason... just that it wouldn't matter to them if the works were "written by the same person" because people of faith already recognize that it wasn't directly written by God or whatever name they call their god. They do, however, accept those books as the "word of God".

I meant that people who have "faith" don't necessarily need confirmation of their faith. They don't believe in God because of a book, they believe in God because they feel something and God is how they explain

I never said they disregarded reason... just that it wouldn't matter to them if the works were "written by the same person" because people of faith already recognize that it wasn't directly written by God or whatever name they call their god.

That wasn't the bit I was disagreeing with. I was disagreeing with

Most people with such beliefs don't need confirmation from some "outside source" as to whether their beliefs are well founded.

In general religious people seem as dependent on outside sources for their beliefs as everybody else.

I have not found that to be the case in my experiences. They may like outside sources, but truly faithful people (not people who go to church as a social function as many do) don't need outside confirmation of their beliefs. I have found that most of these people are the type that respond to reason and have often questioned their own faith at some point and resolved the issue within their own minds.

I don't consider "religious people" to be people of faith. Perhaps that's the confusion here. I think many

I am one of those you might call "truly" faithful, and I most definitely relied on outside confirmations of my faith to determine if the book I chose to hang my immortal soul upon was, in fact, a good historical document. I looked into geographic proofs, historical evidence that fit the data in the bible, threw out the Apocrypha because it was essentially "hearsay" in light of not being direct accounts or second hand accounts, and look at many sections of the "cannonized" bible as questionable due to confl

You've reworded exactly my point. You've taken the "word of God" as you believe it, by comparing it to what you understand logically. You've come up with an illogical belief (that a man was crucified then came back from the dead) based upon your faith, despite all external sources not supporting that belief.

I wasn't trying to imply that any Christian (or other faith-minded person) thinks the entire Bible is word-for-word accurate and an exact "translation" of the word of God. I meant, and obviously wasn'

Really? Do historical accounts from multiple sources (not just the biblical account, but secular accounts as well), in addition to geological digs, predominantly supporting the historical accuracy of the biblical account not count as "outside sources" in your view? If they are not outside sources, then what in the world do you call them? They are not my internal wishes or thoughts, they are outside historical and physical evidence that confirm the theory that Christ rose from the dead. Note I did not sa

You don't think it possible that they might want to know whether their beliefs are well founded?

Of course not. If they did, they would base their beliefs on rational empricism, not a logically inconsistent fantasy whose primary source is a collection of scriptures full of falsehoods, violence and vindictiveness (as well as some beautiful poetry and a smidgen of worthy moral advice that doesn't come close to redeeming the whole.)

You mean they disagree with you, so they must be stupid? If you seriously study the philosophy of religion you will find that it is very well founded indeed. Inconveniently, the counter arguments are also very well founded indeed. That's why it remains a genuine hot area of intellectual debate, although you won't know that if you only read one side or the other. If you think religion can't be well founded, what is your view on the debate over Classical Foundationalism? For example, is memory a rational basi

No, I mean they believe implausible things without proof, and are thus operating on faith. Challenging one's own faith is not possible so long as one still clings to the verities of that faith; it is looking for confirmation, a form of apologetics, which is separate from sincere doubt.

If you seriously study the philosophy of religion

Why do I have a feeling you mean, if I seriously study the philosophy of one religion, without regard to others?

I have studied the philosophical content and historical foundations of a large number of religions (including Chr

No, I mean they believe implausible things without proof, and are thus operating on faith.

They believe things that you (and quite possibly I) find implausible but that they do not find implausible, without proof but with what they believe to be good evidence.

If you seriously study the philosophy of religion

Why do I have a feeling you mean, if I seriously study the philosophy of one religion, without regard to others?

I have no idea why you have that feeling. When I formally studied Philosophy of Religion we covered, for example, the belief that there is no life after death, that there is non-material individual life after death, the belief that there is material individual life after death and the belief that there is reincarnation. Which religion would

First, let me just say I hope you enjoy your vacation. I'm sorry that we won't have a chance to continue this here, but hopefully we'll run into each other again.

[Religious believers] believe things that you (and quite possibly I) find implausible but that they do not find implausible, without proof but with what they believe to be good evidence.

Fair enough. Though in many cases (e.g. Buddhist reincarnation, in which nothing of the individual except the karmic debt passes on to the next life) they believe things about which there cannot be any evidence at all; and in many cases, the evidence they accept is incapable of objective verification. More on that in a minute.

Would be interesting to see if a computer comes up with the same JEDP authors though.

The authorship question aside, it's doubtful that this kind of analysis would catch the more interesting bits of plagerism in the Bible. The lifting of the Flood story from the Sumerian story of Utnapishtim, and the bits of Gilgamesh that are spliced into Eclesiastes, for example.

Although in the latter case Siduri's advice to Gilgamesh (go home and enjoy your life taking joy in your spouse and children, quit trying to live

This play has been widely attributed to Shakespeare by Shakespeare scholars for some time. It already appears in the Oxford Complete Works, the New Cambridge Shakespeare, and (my favorite) the Riverside Shakespeare.

Nothing is ever definitive in this line of work, so it's interesting to have the software weigh in on it. But I don't think any scholars would be changing their minds if it didn't.

For anyone interested I'd suggest M. Wood's documentary, "In Search of Shakespeare". The four part documentary won't answer any of the more delicious and silly questions about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays but it will give as good an historical insight as is easily available. Thomas Kyd [wikipedia.org] is best known for his play The Spanish Tragedy [wikipedia.org] worth reading for the style. Christopher Marlowe [wikipedia.org] and Kyd were the new kids on the block before Shakespeare made his mark. A famous critique of Shakespeare, mentioned in Wood's documentary attacks Shakespeare as unschooled and not an equal to "university wits" like Marlowe. The problem with attribution is that, likely, all authors of that period plagiarized, (by our standards) , one another. Shakespeare started out as an actor with a traveling company IIRC, the King's Men, who were basically a troupe of government propagandists. Theatre was a relatively new phenomenon and was used in the Elizabethan era as a propaganda tool during the conversion of England from Catholic to Protestantism. Shakespeare stole many of the best plots he studied as an actor with the King's Men. While Shakespeare was known to have co-authored plays with others, the missing play based on the first part of Cervantes Don Quxiote [wikipedia.org] is the most notable example, I know of no evidence, though evidence of any kind is scant, that Shakespeare and Kyd worked together. Kyd and Marlowe were implicated as Catholic agents and Marlowe was likely murdered because he was catholic. IMHO neither Marlowe or Kyd can hold a candle to Shakespeare.

Thing is, artists of any sort fall in and out of favour over the years.

Examples abound of people saying similar things to your own comment that "neither Marlowe or Kyd can hold a candle to Shakespeare" about musicians, playwrights and artists many years ago - and in the meantime, the artist being ridiculed has become most famous and the one being revered has fallen into obscurity.

1. Shakespeare had no court experience but wrote about it as though he had (Marlow came from a higher class and was familiar with how the court worked)
2. Time, Shakespeare didn't have the time to actually write the plays and do the research
3. When Marlow disappeared all his writings and notes/drafts vanished.
4. Shakespeare unlike every major writer and artist stopped writing (almost like he ran out of ideas) long before he died.
5. When Sha

Split the work into 2 parts, one with paragraph reading level ratings greater than the overall score, one with the scores less than overall.

Apply plagiarism testing software to compare these two halves and see whether it says they were written by the same or by different persons.

Before the creation of plagiarism testing software, we still had several different reading level testing programs available. I did this test using three different programs. They said that at least two people wrote the work. Ted Kaczynski was never considered to have Multiple Personality Disorder, so if the results (still) say two people wrote it, each with their own style, then it's highly unlikely Kaczynski wrote it by himself.

I don't see any validity in applying the formula to individual paragraphs.

If I were to say "The cat sat on the mat", this would score pretty low on the scale, but there is no better way to express the cat's location to you. If I were to go on to say "thus was my ailurophilia originally instantiated" this sentence would score considerably higher. However I don't see that this provides any evidence that I didn't write both sentences.

I did this test using three different programs. They said that at least two people wrote the work.

This is interesting, but have you validated this method of analysis by applying it to works of known authorship, say on fanfic sites or alt.politics newsgroups, which would be reasonable control sources--unedited outpourings of interested amateurs? That would tell you that works of the same author don't get flagged as different simply due to your reading-level split.

I did this test using three different programs. They said that at least two people wrote the work.

This is interesting, but have you validated this method of analysis by applying it to works of known authorship, say on fanfic sites or alt.politics newsgroups, which would be reasonable control sources--unedited outpourings of interested amateurs? That would tell you that works of the same author don't get flagged as different simply due to your reading-level split.

Ideally I'd like to see a p-value for your claim that "the work was written by at least two people" against the null hypothesis "only one person wrote the work". Without a p-value you really aren't saying anything. Presumably the plagiarism detection software produces a probability of works being by the same author. What you need to do is apply your reading-level split to a bunch of works and generate a distribution (histogram) of the probabilities that the two parts of each work are from different authors. Then ask the question: what are the odds that the probability I get from applying this analysis of Kaczynski was drawn from this distribution? That is your p-value. If it is very small, it is implausible that Kaczynski's work was written by one author.

There are still problems with your approach, but doing this would bring you into the realm of discourse where people could argue about your method, but not dispute the objectivity of your result given your assumptions.

Excellent points. In fact it was tested by and on members of several newsgroups, Fidonet echoes, and various members and sources of a university journalism class. The test barrage that resulted was used regularly to perform verbal forensics against some classic usenet trolls. Check usenet history for S.P.(U.T.U.)M.

A null hypothesis would be simply 'unable to support alternative hypothesis(-es)'. Saying it was shown to be one person would require support for an alternative hypothesis in the form of a correla

If someone plagiarized Shakespeare, then of course it's going to contain matches because someone is copying his style and turn of phrase. Isn't that the point of this software? I don't see how finding matches allows anyone to say one way or another that the unknown work was authored by the same person. It could well be an imitator, which I'm sure Shakespeare had plenty of during his time and thereafter.

Personally, I've always thought of these plagiarism detection systems as ticking time bombs. The more data they acquire, the less unique each individual work entered into the system becomes. Eventually, a point will come where there will be a near 100% false-positive rate on submitted works that are original, but fail because they are worded too similarly to works already stored in the database.

For example:

"With a program called Pl@giarism, Vickers detected 200 strings of three or more words in 'Edward III'

For example, these matching strings could just as well be common turns of phrase of the day. There doesn't seem to be any indication that the software was re-configured for common expressions of old English.

This is gibberish. The software isn't configured for common expressions of modern English, either. If you understand what it's doing, you should understand why no such configuration is necessary, as long as the two works being compared are contemporaneous. (Or heck, even if they aren't -- correlation should go down in that case, a high score is even more indicative when comparing non-contemporaneous authors.)

The study would be more plausible if works by two different authors IN ENGLAND IN THE YEAR 1600 contained 20 or so matching strings. But since that control group is missing -- so is the validity of the conclusion.

This is just misinformed. They've compared works by both the same author and different authors in England around 1600. It turns out it's just as true then as it is today that works by different authors contain significantly smaller sets of common wording. Indeed, this technique is used to identify which 60% of the play was written by Kyd (by comparing with his other work) and which 40% comes from The Bard. Comparing known works of either Kyd or The Bard with other works by the same author produce the same high correspondence, and comparing known works between the two different authors produces the same low correspondence.

Shakespeare didn't write Old English. He actually wrote modern English. Old English is Anglo-Saxon. Even Chaucer (Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote) wrote in English, though he was sometimes unsure as to how many esses to use.

Why the pedantry? Because, if you didn't know that, you really shouldn't be pontificating on linguistics or linguistic analysis.

> Shakespeare didn't write Old English. He actually wrote modern English.

No, he wrote early English. It *is* English (unlike Old English, which is not the same language at all), but it is most definitely not the modern form thereof.

> Old English is Anglo-Saxon.

Yes, that's right. Actually, "Anglo-Saxon" is a much better name for it, because it's not really anything you would recognize as English. It's much more closely related to Germanic and Scandinavian languages.

To be fair, he said "old English," not "Old English." Shakespeare's English is from around four hundred years ago, which makes it pretty old. "Archaic" would have been a less ambiguous word choice, and "Elizabethan" more accurate, but he wasn't necessarily confusing Shakespeare with Alfred.

Same argument used to claim that Francis Bacon or Essex wrote the plays.

Now consider TP. Started in local journalism, worked in PR dfor the nuclear industry. Didn't have a classical education. Very successful author. Like WS, gets themes from all over the place, pastiches, parodies, makes them his own. TP is a "middlebrow" author. If you know the literature of the period, you will know the highbrow stuff - the stuff that would win Bookers nowadays - is almost unreadable today. Shakespeare was a popular play